


imploring harvest

by chartreuser



Series: waiting for refuge [1]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aliens, Established Relationship, M/M, Some humour, a lot of photosynthesis, iphone-consuming alien, ovi is a plant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-07 04:17:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12225585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chartreuser/pseuds/chartreuser
Summary: Nicke just wants to play hockey, eat some iPhones, and watch his boyfriend photosynthesise.





	imploring harvest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fourthlinewinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fourthlinewinger/gifts).



> to dear wing, 
> 
> i dearly, dearly hope you like this fic! i know that this doesn't hit all the marks that you had wanted, so i hope i have ventured in that leeway that you were willing to provide your gift with, haha. nickyovi is also a ship i hold very closely to my heart, so i hope that i have done you justice with this fic, as you rightly deserve. :)
> 
> also, if anybody is interested, i've written this fic to this spotify playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/harvestingg/playlist/1WogU3MJrMcL7SDa4FBZ9w).
> 
> content warnings are at the bottom if anybody needs them!

Nicke turns up for the scheduled meeting alone.

It’s not a problem: the compulsory check-ins by authorities get less compulsory by the year, and it’s a lot of trouble to go to for two aliens who aren't even American. The shine to them has worn off, after Nicke and Sasha had played in the NHL for a few years. The Americans had some measure of understanding to what the experiments were, and the Swedes and Russians stopped touching them as much, once the experiments had been brought up in official capacity, discreet. Unethical, some pointed out, because the aliens seemed to have some measure of humanity to them, as limiting as the word was. 

So they're allowed to exist, this way.

 o     o  
 \  /

He comes back early enough not to miss the game. Nothing is out of left field, nothing is abnormal. Nicke doesn’t look like an alien who’s just been interviewed for two hours as Sasha glides towards him like the glorified brick wall that he is.

“Don’t try and eat the jumbotron,” says Sasha, who seems to have no recollection of skipping a highly-classified inquisition sanctioned by the U.S. government. “I don’t think we have budget to buy them another.”

“I’m not going to eat it just because it looks good,” argues Nicke, because the jumbotron looks as alluring as ever, even if Nicke is sure that his appetite isn’t large enough for that. Another one of Sasha’s phones will have to do. “It’s too high up for me to reach.”

Sasha laughs, booping his nose with a finger. “You’ll find way to eat other things.”

“Maybe,” Nicke allows, and then he leans in closer. “Why didn’t you go for the meeting today?”

“Didn’t feel like it,” says Sasha. “They don’t do much—just ask boring questions. We never have answers for them; don’t know why they keep asking.”

Nicke supposes that it’s true, since they were two intergalactic refugees that landed on Earth without even knowing how. They were too young when they came—there’s nothing to report other than what they’ve already said, and everything left was just arbitrary to them, just another culture. Sometimes people from NASA or Roscosmos contacted them—but they were only children when they came, and now they are only hockey players. Mostly Nicke and Sasha just lived their lives humanly.

“Okay,” Nicke says. He looks at the faded green tint to Sasha’s skin. “I think I’ll stop going, too.”

“Good,” says Sasha simply, and then he bumps their shoulders together. “We celebrate by going with boys to dinner.”

“ _How_ ,” Nicke laughs, because they can’t eat human food—or rather, Sasha can, but it’s about as useful to him as a football on ice.

“We feed humans alcohol and watch them suffer tomorrow morning.” He drags Nicke in to kiss the side of his helmet. “Get new blackmail.” Sasha skates off to Tom’s direction, where Andre is plastered to his back, trying for a hug. Somewhere in the distance is Kuzya and Dima seeing all the commotion and skating over to see what’s happening, and they’re all going to have to drive the children back to the greenhouse,  _again_.

“We don’t even have enough alcohol,” says Nicke, mostly to himself. TJ is letting out a loud hoot, because the whole team is going to invite themselves over, and Sasha is going to have a fit if anybody touches the new sunflowers too many times. Nicke will have to find a new place for them to be hungover in, because Sasha has repurposed too many bathtubs in the greenhouse, since everywhere he goes is a garden.

Sasha glides back to him then, victorious. “Gonna be fun,” he declares. “Maybe Andre help out with watering plants in morning.”

 o     o  
 \  /

Sasha isn’t native to this solar system—Nicke doesn’t actually know where he’s from; if he came to Earth the same way as Nicke did, clueless and bumbling as the evacuation ship crashed into the Swedish countryside, where most of his podmates died. Everybody knew what was going to happen—Nicke was just part of the military’s last ditch efforts to get the children out there, to hope they could survive with other lifeforms that were kind enough to allow them to live. It didn’t seem to matter, regardless, considering Nicke’s homeland was obsolete, and Nicke didn’t even know enough to guess if some parts of it remained, or if the dregs of his childhood are all gone by now. Sasha refuses to speak of what happened, but Nicke knows that the planet he was from had jungles, that they sprawled over their land mass and clung—that it seemed like a paradise, somehow, if there ever was one.

“It was bigger than Earth,” Sasha had said once, his eyes closed in Nicke’s Gävle house, lying on that fake grass carpet that started out as a joke, but inexplicably became one of Sasha’s favourite places. “Everything’s bigger there: trees, flowers, people. Easy to get lost. You know how everything’s so different here, so small? Like a joke, but you remember you cannot go back, and then it’s not so funny anymore.”

Nicke had listened to him then, and tried to imagine all of that: Sasha running with his feet bare on the forest floor, his skin colour turned green from their suns, someplace far away enough that Nicke hadn’t even heard of—but he couldn’t, or maybe he just didn’t want to. Everybody where Nicke came from seemed to know that they were dying, breathing some kind of rarefied air that none of them could escape. He keeps wondering if Sasha knew that he’d be the only person left after all of this, that it was impossible for him to see again any of these other people that came from that monocoloured world. That maybe he’d read about them sometimes in a children’s book.

But Nicke couldn’t ever explain concisely enough what home essentially was—how it worked, what they did to live. What architecture they had—or if it resembled anything he’d found here, those tall multi-storeyed buildings and the singular sun, the water, the softness of everything. What he’d meant by saying that everything was harsher there, with none of the deception of human nature. Smiling to appease, eating as a means of socialization, fucking, sleeping, all these things he had to do in his current body, melded to be as human as they could have made him. He was an ambassador in the way that nobody acknowledged him, but an ambassador nonetheless, just a useless one; a representative of someplace that passed on a long time ago.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke doesn’t bother eating with the rest of them, because human food is pointless if it tastes like nothing and doesn’t contain metal _or_ batteries; which many of his teammates object to—Andre and Tom are trying furiously to convince him the virtues of… beef? As if Nicke would want to put a portion of fried beef carcass into his mouth.

“Don’t eat too much,” Sasha informs the whole table. “Still drinking!”  

“Shouldn’t one of us at least go and _buy some alcohol_ ,” asks Nicke, who’s busy trying to escape Latts, who looks like he’s about to literally start throwing food at TJ. It seems like a waste. Nicke would rather them throw their phones instead, and then plead innocence after they have magically disappeared from their play fights. “We don’t have alcohol at home, Sasha.”

“Don’t we?”

“No,” Nicke says. Sasha looks way too unconcerned for someone who has promised their horde of beasts a whole night of mindless drinking and video games. He’s been specifically reminded to _not_ eat the gaming console that Kuzya is bringing over from his house, but Kuzya’s earning a substantial amount of money now, he could easily buy himself another if it was somehow eaten by a monster. “We don’t drink, remember? You _photosynthesize_. Like a plant.”

“I’m your favourite plant,” says Sasha, nonsensically. “Fine, we’ll go buy some from wherever.”

“Thank you,” says Nicke, and then: “I suppose I’ll have to be the one to buy it?”

Sasha swivels his head to stare at him. “Yes.” His eyes turn softly green for a split second, because the asshole knows his way around Nicke, by now. “Take one of the children to go with you, and then I’ll meet you back at the greenhouse?”

“Fine,” Nicke says. “Whatever.” He kisses Sasha on the cheek and pats Latts on the shoulder before he and Tom decide to take TJ’s head off for fun. “Don’t let them wreck the restaurant.”

Nicke leaves with Latts following close on his heels—he’s going to be the one to choose what kind of alcohol the humans will ingest, because Nicke really has no idea what’s going on in this regard. The man at the counter doesn’t blink when Latts gamely carries an excessive number of bottles—that must be a record—and Nicke sacrifices his credit card for the team’s happiness.

Latts whistles at the cost. “That’s expensive,” he says.

“You chose everything,” Nicke points out, but it’s not like he minds. He spends most of his money on food, but that’s really all he needs to survive. He’d much rather spend it on the team and Sasha—Nicke has cravings, but they’re impossible to fulfil. He’ll give up hockey if he could satisfy them, but he can’t, and right now, all he has is money.

 o     o  
 \  /

Latts is the one to haul everything they’ve bought into the living room, where the team has mostly congregated. “All of you have a duty to finish everything,” says Nicke. “Or you bring it home. I don’t care which. This leaves the greenhouse after tonight.”

“We use it to water plants,” whispers Kuzya.

Nicke smacks the back of his head. “Sasha will kill you.”

“But you won’t, right?” Kuzya asks in Russian. “If you beg for our lives, he probably wouldn’t kill us.”

“Maybe he’d just turn us into ferns,” adds Dima.

“I think that would be acceptable,” says Nicke. “I’m sure we have the space to keep the two of you around.”

“Do you?” Kuzya asks. “It’s crowded in here.”

Nicke pauses. “We’ll make space,” he says. He looks towards the staircase, where the wisterias have coiled themselves around the banister. Sasha should have made his way downstairs, by now. He raises his antennae. “We make space all the time.”

Sasha had bought this house the year Nicke came, but Nicke was the one to remodel the ceilings to turn them into glass. He’d loved the idea of the transparent ceilings, the way that they could stare out into the sky at night and pretend it was the view they were used to, growing up. Nicke had grown to love the personality of this place; the kind of rich plentifulness that you wouldn’t expect from North America. Sunlight drips into all the spaces they have in the day—the abundance of it blinds you sometimes, surrounds you, until the furniture is sun-bleached and the plants grow with that vibrant lushness like in forest clearings.

Everything grows in here under Sasha’s hands. Nicke watches him tend to them every morning; Sasha has a literal green thumb that spurs growth into something almost unnatural—large, towering. Some of the leaves brush against the ceiling. Nicke loves the plants too, despite being inept with them: they seem like a natural extension of Sasha, swaying lightly with the windows open. Nothing about them is similar to the mechanical functionality of Nicke’s body—but it brings him a dim sort of happiness to know that there’s someplace here that’s alien in its own way, too, that Nicke isn’t the only foreigner here.

“Don’t actually water the plants with alcohol,” Nicke reminds them. “Sasha would be devastated that you’re ruining his babies.”

“Your babies too,” Sasha says, and presses a kiss to the back of his neck. “Don’t think I haven’t caught you talking to them.”

“I don’t talk to them as often as you do,” Nicke points out.

“Yes,” Sasha allows. “But you still do, yeah?” He turns to TJ, whose eyes are gleaming rather sinisterly. “When he’s half-awake, he greets all the plants one by one, you know?” Then he launches into a terrible mimic of Nicke’s accent: “Hello, good morning, how are you. I’m Nicklas, and I’m crying, because my boyfriend refuse to let me eat laptop.”

Carly snorts, and TJ’s eyebrows are raised high as he nods, newly-informed. Nicke scoffs at all of this. “I don’t cry when I cannot eat your computer,” he says. “I have other better things to eat.”

“Not my playstation,” Kuzya chimes in.

“Not Kuzya’s playstation,” Nicke allows. “Your phone, maybe.”

Sasha laughs. “Sure,” he says, and hands it over in all of its new, fully-charged magnificence.

 o     o  
 \  /

What hurts is the easy settlement of this. Sometimes Nicke watches Sasha stare quietly at the unrestrained growth in the house, how his hope has gone rancid after years of too much love for that homeland of his; what hurts is that Nicke can’t do anything about that and neither can Sasha. They’re both obstinate, and maybe this comes as a detriment to them, but Nicke remembers how Sasha had persisted on eating human food before they lived together, living out of a suitcase in a sterile, lifeless hotel room that seemed so wrong a place to hold someone like Sasha. There’s something about pure, unfiltered happiness that comes after losing everything and owning nothing, and Nicke has learned how to be thankful for gaining someone to love years after he’d left his family underground, behind those closed doors.

Nicke hadn’t thought about the soil much before he’d met Sasha; there wasn’t anything like the earth back home, where everything was pointed and wasn’t afraid of hurting you. There weren’t oceans, though there were lakes, and animals were the kind of rarity that you’d touch signals with all your friends to let them know about. He hadn’t known what flowers were. There was grass, sometimes, mostly weeds that children had braided into their antennae for a joke, and the winds were bitter and Nicke had loved it, loved the harshness of the cruel, hard-packed landscapes, how everything was unbreakable, how it was nearly impossible to hurt.

Now Nicke thinks that maybe hurting is just a symptom of being alive here—on Earth it seems like danger is constantly lurking somewhere waiting to strike; maybe they wanted you to sign your body away for another experiment, maybe you were the unfortunate victim of a gunfight, maybe you fell in love with an idiot who didn’t understand the concept of fashion, but they seem to be dangers that everybody is capable of weathering, mostly. This body is more fragile than the last one he had. They hadn’t touched his central processing unit, but it nearly seemed liable, too, like Sasha had cut his chest open while Nicke was asleep, to sow his seeds there, to grow flowers, to demand until Nicke felt like this weightiness was meant to stay in this. In the middle of everything.

 

 o     o  
 \  /

Sasha wakes earlier than Nicke, most days: he tends to the plants, checks on them, and slowly wakes up surrounded by green as he sits on the floor, sipping water out of the World’s Best Dad mug given to him as a joke. Nicke leaves him alone in the mornings, his legs extended in front of him, looking awkwardly miniscule in between the palms and the dracaenas as he turns the kind of green that reminds Nicke most of South Asian treetops, that lush, exuberant colour mostly untouched by mankind.

But Sasha is still asleep this morning as Nicke blinks his eyes open. His skin isn’t flushed green, pale, but it looks almost sickly to Nicke, despite knowing that there’s nothing wrong with him. He climbs out of the bed to draw the curtains open.

“Sasha,” Nicke calls, watching the sunlight hit Sasha’s face, adding colour to his whole body—he looks right like this, when he doesn’t exert control over his skin, and lets the sun happen to him. “The babies need feeding.”

Sasha rolls over to his back and blinks his eyes open, his irises dimming into a pewter grey as his pupils surface. He stops and stares at Nicke for a quiet while, long enough for the sunlight to move a fraction across the room. Nicke lets him stare, standing barefooted on the floor. “Which babies,” Sasha rasps out after a while. “Plants or humans?”

“Both,” says Nicke. He wriggles his antennae out of habit, although there’s no way for him to detect signals from humans at all—or anything, really, now that there’s no one left but him. “I suppose we don’t have food for the humans.”

“Humans can starve,” Sasha points out, holding his hand out for Nicke. “Baby plants cannot die.”

“Andre, Latts and Willy will die without supervision,” says Nicke. He steps into Sasha’s space, climbing back into bed to cup his rapidly greening cheek. “Maybe I should introduce them to my diet.”

“Humans don’t eat phones, Nicke,” Sasha says. He looks like he’s holding his laughter in, turning his neck to press his mouth into Nicke’s palm. “They use them. For calling people.”

“That’s pointless,” says Nicke. “They have mouths, don’t they.”

“We don’t have fancy antenna for long distance communication.”

“That’s on all of you,” Nicke points out, trying for serious but breaking out into a smile. “People keep playing with my food. I don’t like it.”

Sasha grins at him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing.”

“Okay,” Nicke allows. He’s still sitting in his lap. For a moment he wonders what temperature feels like, if Sasha’s insistence of heat feels good to the touch, or if there’s a kind of comfort in Sasha’s body to be found. Nicke’s been told that his skin is perpetually cool, and has been likened to a vampire many times by his teammates. Sasha doesn’t seem to mind, though.

“How many babies do you think are left in here?” Sasha asks, his hand combing through strands of Nicke’s hair.

“Andre, Tom, Latts. Kuzya, probably.”

“Hmm.”

“We don’t have food to feed them.”

“Humans eat salads, don’t they,” asks Sasha. “If we leave them here long enough, do you think they’ll attack the flowers?”

“I’ll shave off all their hair if they do,” promises Nicke.

“Thanks,” Sasha brightens. “I love you.”

Nicke has heard that from Sasha every single day—the words whispered in the morning, after a game, in the crackles of his voice over the phone as Sasha goes to trek through forests when he misses home. Sometimes he replays them in his head, because humans may love him here on Earth, but they’re still natives, and they have each other—Nicke is going to perpetually be a visitor peering into the display cases of their lives, but at least Sasha is there, too, with his electrically green eyes, his alienness reaching out for Nicke, that immensely huge, delicate feeling of trying to cradle love before it’s robbed away from him again. Nicke had been determined to love him, at first, but now it’s turned unconditional, the terrible fragility that Nicke loves feeling, the kind that he hasn’t felt ever since he lost his home and culture to bleak nothingness.

“I love you too,” Nicke says, in his messy, muddled voice that hasn’t been calibrated yet. “I love you more than you know.”

Sasha strokes a thumb across his jawline. “I know,” he says, and kisses him. He looks like he believes Nicke. He looks comforted, even. But Sasha is the kind of person that tucks away his ugliness for no one to see, almost as if there’s no grief to him at all.

Downstairs, Latts is groaning with face down on the sofa, Tom blocking out the sun with his fingers as Andre whines pathetically to nobody. Kuzya seems comparatively fine, though, and he inches closer to his playstation when he sees Nicke coming down the stairs, bleary-eyed.

“Weak,” says Sasha behind him. “Should be better at drinking.”

Andre makes a pitiful noise.

“You try drinking that much shit,” says Kuzya, in Russian. “You’re not fucking human, what do you know.”

Sasha shrugs. “Plants are superior beings,” he points out, and then he nudges Nicke. “Yes, Nicke?”

“Yes,” says Nicke obligingly.

“I’m pretty sure Nicky is stronger than plants,” says Kuzya. “He’s like, made out of metal.”

That’s a little incorrect, technically, but Nicke isn’t in the mood to make corrections, and leaves them to bicker, bringing the other three idiots water and ibuprofen. Kuzya packs up his shit and leaves early, and Sasha disappears to take care of the plants.

“You guys can help me tidy the greenhouse,” says Nicke, when they look moderately more alive. There’s not much for them to do, if he’s honest, but Nicke would take whatever help he can get; the place is huge, and the windows don’t clean themselves. The three of them do this regularly—in fact, most of the team does, because Nicke isn’t comfortable living solitarily like Sasha, and he’s used to living in a commune, where everybody knows somebody, and he likes the noise of a small crowd and its presence.

“Nicke,” calls Latts from the balcony. “What do I do with the telescope?”

Nicke looks towards him. “Leave it,” he says. The telescope has flecks of dirt from the wind and the rain from earlier. “I’ll clean it myself.”

Latts looks like he wants to ask something, his hands clutching onto the paper towel he’d snagged from Tom.

“What is it?” Nicke asks.

“Do you do this all the time?” Latts asks, pointing towards the chair beside it, the jacket draped innocuously over the back. He’s curious, like most humans are about him, but it’s the first time Latts had ever gone into uncharted territory and asked him a question. “What do you look at?”

“I’m not really looking for anything,” says Nicke, because there’s nothing to look for. “I just wanted to—see.” He cranes his head towards Sasha, who can hear him whirring from five streets away. Sometimes it helps to know that someone will know when he’s upset, but this isn’t something that Sasha likes to think about: Nicke spending hours with his neck bent, alone, almost wishing he could go back out there. “I don’t recognize anything. But maybe someday…”

Maybe someday Nicke will see a familiar vessel out of impossible coincidence. Maybe someday Nicke will see an unfamiliar one, to tell Sasha about it, so maybe there was someone else to keep safe from all the confusion that hasn’t evaded them on Earth, to shelter from the fact that for some of them, home is a place that they will never come back to.

“I just wanted to see something,” finishes Nicke, a little lamely.

 o     o  
 \  /

“You’re really not going back?” asks Sasha from the sofa, half-naked, the mid-noon laziness stark in his posture. Everyone’s left. There’s no one left in the greenhouse but them, and Nicke abruptly misses it, but it’s not so bad with Sasha around.  

“No,” Nicke says.

Sasha holds up the letter in his hand. “They want you to.”

“They wanted you to go back too,” Nicke straightens from bending over to look at the new cacti he’d brought back from his run. He likes them; they were easily found back home in the deserts, used as landmarks, as a means of navigation. “But you didn’t want to, so you didn’t, and I thought that maybe I should do the same.”

“I thought it was important to you,” says Sasha, after a little while.

“It wasn’t,” Nicke answers. “All these questions… I don’t actually have answers for them. They want to study us—me. I told them there’s no point.”

Sasha looks stricken—the colour washes from his face. “Nicke,” he says, and he goes, and lets Sasha clutch him too tightly. “Don’t tell me they—”

Nicke pulls his hand out of Sasha’s grip to rub a thumb over his knuckles—he looks horrified. Nicke embraces him as much as he can like this, hearing the sounds of his body going into overdrive, that dull, frantic whirring noise that doesn’t leave his head. “Did you think I always looked like this?” Nicke asks, as gently as he can.

Sasha makes a low, pained noise into his chest.

“How likely would it have been if I’d looked like them this whole time?” asks Nicke.

Sasha half-shrugs. “I didn’t want to think they did the same things to you, too,” he says, and Nicke tries not to flinch at that.

“They did,” Nicke says. He doesn’t dare to look Sasha in the eyes. He’d find empathy there, he knows it, the kind of understanding that’s harder to swallow than when it’s not there. “They took me apart, remodeled me in their image. I thought I was lucky that they taught me how to talk, once I had a mouth… You know how they didn’t think you’d feel pain?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” says Nicke. He recalibrates his throat, but his voice sounds badly filtered, like a broken sound system. “I think they didn’t know I was alive… That I was some communication device. Like a television.” Nicke laughs. “A fucking television. So they removed the screws, the bolts, the body. They didn’t think I was a real thing.” He looks down to Sasha, finally, who’s still holding onto him. “That if you weren’t made out of flesh and bone like them, you—you know? And now they want to… ask questions. It’s been going for years. They don’t run out of them.”

Sasha loosens his grip on him. His hands slide up his sides, rubbing circles there, the clean, untouched greenness of them almost hurtful to look at. Nicke hadn’t seen green often when he grew up—his world was always extremities. Wildfires, avalanches. Earthquakes. Earth seemed so much more hospitable when he came, but Nicke soon learned that he’d much rather have died at home.

“So many of them don’t know sufficiency,” Sasha says after a pause. His Russian is so fluent that Nicke forgets that he’s not a native speaker. But their native languages don’t exist anymore, technically, if the only heads they exist in are theirs. “It’s not enough to… know. At home, we just wanted to… They insist on deconstructing everything.”

“I know.”

“And after they’re done with you…”

“They ask questions.”

“Yeah,” says Sasha. “I thought… I’d hoped they treated you with kindness.”

Nicke tilts his head, considering. He looks at the surgery scars slashed across Sasha’s chest like the veins of a leaf.  There’s so much that they’re owed, but Sasha and him are trespassers here, and they’ll be trespassers everywhere. They will spend a whole life mending wounds that reopen again and again. Even the taiga cannot hide the pain from Sasha. The underground bunkers that Nicke’s family resided in and opened their doors to. _Come in_ , Nicke was taught to transmit. They opened their doors to anyone and offered shelter. _Come in until the winds are done._ The winds never died down, but the cruelty of them did, and sometimes they’d go and scavenge for food that the previous species had left around before they succumbed to extinction. Nicke always felt grateful that they did—he starved enough as it was, and what would happen if they’d refused to share? But he wishes he hadn’t thought that… It was a cruel thing to be thankful for.

“Some of them do,” allows Nicke. “Some of them didn’t.” But you learned to get by. Nicke had grown up starving; he knows better than to want for the things he couldn’t have. But he’d wanted a family again deeply, to have someone that he was sure in loving.

They sit there in a silence.

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Then don’t,” Sasha says. He offers his hand. Nicke rubs his fingers over his palm lines. They look so—authentic. They really molded them both after themselves. Their hands look like real hands. They look like breathing people. Maybe they can even be considered as such. Nicke doesn’t know if he wants them to think of him this way, if it’s cruel to erase this inhuman part of his survival. Sasha flexes his hand and the muscles move accordingly.

That part—Nicke is familiar with. Gears and cogs. Flicking switches to make room for his expanding organs. Those are the ones they left him. He wishes they’d left him more. He wishes he had something to show Sasha the way Sasha could grow his plants unnaturally, an ability he retained from that distant world. He wishes that there was a larger capacity in him for understanding before he came, so that home would be something more than a distant dream, the surreal nightmares you’d have of the storms and the hail beating down on you, your family poking at your antennae in a good reminder to have them stayed upright, the people you brought into your home… Nicke only remembered how to survive. He supposes it’s fitting that way.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke’s business is always going to be in Sweden, and the military would always want him back: his contract in the NHL doesn’t guarantee him a life out of the country, and Nicke is not so naïve to assume that they would let him leave easily. He’s signed contracts, involuntarily or not, and they’d come to an understanding that he was an important asset to the military. Nicke supposes that this was his fault, too, for having told them too much. But he hadn’t known. War didn’t exist at home—people were too busy fighting to keep themselves alive, and never from their own kind.

 _We need you to tell us so we can help you_ , they’d said, and Nicke had put his good faith in. He was a child. Age didn’t exist, but Nicke knew he was one by size, by how most of other survivors towered over him too, how his family had known almost intuitively where the craters were. How to dig for food under rubble. They taught everybody that didn’t know how. _We don’t know much about where you came from. We need to know. In case anybody like you came again_. This was after they’d torn him open and cut into his brain. _We need information._ It’s the way humans have existed this whole time.

“I wish you’d told me,” Nicke opens his mouth to say. “I wish I’d told you.”

What did the Russians tell Sasha? Did they tell him the same things, made the same apologies? Did he also have to beg them to stop? Did they cut down his limbs? Did they shoot at him? Did they drop him under water to see if he’d still function? Did they give him an entirely new body? Did he starve?

“I understand,” Sasha says. Nicke doesn’t know how to tell him that that’s the worst thing of all: that he does. He hates that he does. He doesn’t know how they keep finding ways to comprehend.

He takes the letter from Sasha’s hand, crumpled by now. He tears it apart.

“They’ll come back for me,” Nicke says to him. “They always have.”

Sasha blinks the grey out from his eyes. “I know,” he says, and then he switches to English. “Maybe someday they wouldn’t.”

“Maybe,” Nicke echoes.

 o     o  
 \  /

The team doesn’t know much about either of them, in retrospect, although Nicke and Sasha has never bothered to truly hide anything about what they are, even if there are a lot of misconceptions. _One day at a time_ , Nicke had thought, when he first walked out looking like them, his antennae slicked back into his hair. _They’ll know, if they want to know._

But nobody really ever does. People prefer posting online about conspiracies instead. The human imagination is often much more easy to bear. History too, if it’s distant enough from them. But the human condition requires pain, and it doesn’t choose a time to exist in. Nicke feels pain, too, even if they don’t think so: it hurts to have his brains rearranged, it hurts when his organs are exposed and prodded at. It hurts that he’s a new thing for them to learn about. It hurts that none of the procedures they put Nicke through are safe, that he’s an observation for them to monitor. They’ll do what they want to. Nicke has no choice but to let them. His life is in their hands, like now: when he’s sprawled on the ice with his face down, his hips losing their solidity. Some part of his body is overheating, and the bones—the cogs—Nicke can’t tell which is which anymore—are breaking down. Nicke can move his legs, but his hips are disintegrating. Something must have gone wrong.

“Nicklas?” Someone is flipping him over, stroking their hand over his jaw, and it’s soothing, and when Nicke blinks twice, it’s Sasha, his hand barely exerting any pressure onto his skin. But Nicke can’t hear him over the sound of his own whirring, and Sasha doesn’t seem to be hearing him either—as much as Nicke is trying to touch signals, he’s not receiving anything.

He feels like he’s back on an operating table. He watches his teammates gather around his body. For a brief moment, Nicke mistakes them for scientists, the white jerseys, the bright overhead lights. _I think he’s alive_ , they said, once they’d cut into him with their scalpels. _I think he can hear us_. His hips scratch over something else inside of him like nails on a chalkboard. It feels like an accident in a welder’s workshop; the wires in him are snapping into his flesh, into whatever organs he has left.

“I think something’s caught in the machinery,” Nicke broadcasts, as clearly as he can. “I’m not feeling them. There’s something wrong. It hurts.”

“Nicky?” Sasha asks. He presses a thumb to Nicke’s bottom lip. “Nicke, I need you to talk.”

“Tell them the hip’s malfunctioning,” Nicke bites out, with his useless teeth and his useless tongue and his useless throat. He vibrates a little, sucking a deep breath of air in. It doesn’t work if he doesn’t process oxygen. “You’re my proxy.”

The whirring comes to a stop, abruptly. Nicke is not unfamiliar with searing pain, or fire, or chainsaws, and this is nowhere near the worst experience that he’s been put through, but Nicke knows what it’s like to panic, and he also knows that it’s a bad sign when he stops. “The unit’s shutting down.” But Sasha looks level-headed, even if he’s turned an undersaturated green.

“Nicklas,” Sasha says, and Nicke’s abruptly brought back to Sasha’s electric eyes, the pain of him understanding, him knowing that there are complications to a body, to a fake human body that shouldn’t exist in this world, a body they threw together to hope it worked, a prototype that they didn’t care to succeed. “You be okay?”

Nicke smiles at him, and remembers how to do it properly this time. “I hope so,” he says, feeling the brush of Sasha’s lips on his forehead, and shuts down.

 o     o  
 \  /

When the draft was over, Sasha pulled him by arm into an empty room.

Getting to the NHL was not easy: Nicke’s body was not made to exist; it was not even made to really sustain itself after the first few years. It kept breaking down, so they kept fixing it: sometimes the screws were loose, and sometimes Nicklas had to skate the pain away. He’d thought about giving up, but a life that people paid slight attention to was better than one kept away underground, and Nicke was miraculously good enough at this one thing to keep chipping at it. When he was younger, more delusional, he’d thought this was his way out: but on Earth you were helpless, and it was difficult to run away. If they wanted your body, then they had it; Nicke figured that it was a better guarantee at the time to comply than to start his escape.

There was so much promise in being allowed to go overseas without someone pulling you aside for scans every two hours; Nicke was used to the relentless breaches of privacy, but he was tired of being stripped open; people like him were born to hide from danger instead of confronting it. He thought that maybe it would work, if he’d shut his eyes every time and pretend that he was safe in another underground bunker. They’d shut off his sight so he couldn’t see. Sometimes the power would run out, but they had fires to burn, and Nicke had never felt scared at home before, even when the ground rattled underneath him and the food supply was depleted.

The U.S. government wouldn’t dare tamper with a military asset like Nicke; living in D.C. had just meant that he had to cooperate annually, answer a few questions. Nicke thought he could handle that… but it was a distant dream until he’d learned that there could have been someone to answer the questions with him. Suddenly it’d felt like how the winds would die down above ground; how he’d be able to join his family in the open and mine for food again, the cold dryness of the air welcome against his skin, prickling against his antennae.

Nicke watched Sasha then, his pupils disappearing into a field of green, that riotous, striking shade: he’d never seen that before, but it felt like a dream, from a utopian land where the air was still and clean; someplace that you’d never have to hide from. The rest of him looked human, but there was a greenish tint to it, like he’d spent the whole day rolling in the grass—he was so beautiful that Nicke almost didn’t dare to look at him, in fear that he wasn’t real, afraid that he was really just a dream.

He’d reached out with a shaking hand to touch his jaw. Abruptly Nicke was aware of how his antennae was crooked, almost upright, but he couldn’t find the will in him to do anything about it, not if it’d meant looking away and thinking about the necessity of staying human, of blending in.

“Hello,” Nicke transmitted, before he’d remembered himself, and opened his mouth. “I’ve finally met you.”

“Hello,” this alien had said back, blinking, and in a rush, he’d recoloured into a bright, intense green. Nicke was still cradling his jaw, and he’d leaned into the touch, raising his hand to overlay it over Nicke’s. “Call me Sasha.”

“I’m Nicke,” he said. “I’m…” Nicke was at a loss for words. “I wanted to know you for so long.”

“And now you do,” said Sasha, simply, like it really was just that. But he’d understood, Nicke thought, judging by the way Sasha looked at him, like he’d seen a figure from a lifetime ago, a brief flash of someone you once loved in the crowd. Nicke knew that feeling. He recognised the look. It was still difficult to look at him, especially with how he was staring at Nicke, hopeful and resolute in a way that Nicke never thought he’d see again above ground.

Nicke had wanted to say something more tangible— _How did you come here? Did they treat you well? What kind of person did they make you become? Will you stay with me, until I retire? Who did you leave behind?_ —but everything sounded wrong, and he’d wanted Sasha to like him so much that he hadn’t known what to do with it, if he could even process finally the idea of not being completely alone.

“It’s okay,” Sasha said, finally, after a long while, and it was only then that Nicke realized that his body was shaking. He would have cried if he were able to, he’d thought, and it looked for a moment that Sasha’s eyes were about to spill over, too, and then they did… he’d closed his eyes and tipped his head back, his throat scarred over with stripes of lighter green flesh peeking through. Then his eyes snapped open again, and his mouth lingered open for a bit, before Sasha reached up to pat Nicke’s antennae down in place, just where he liked it, back onto his slicked back hair.

“I love you,” Nicke said, all in a rush, because it was true, and he didn’t know how to keep it in; Nicke wasn’t sure he had the body to hide something so large and potent. “I’ve loved you ever since I knew you existed here with me.”

“Yes,” said Sasha, and then, obviously, like it’d made the simplest sense in the world: “I love you too. We have each other now, you know?”

Nicke had frozen then, leaning into Sasha’s space, his hand dangling mid-air, and then Sasha took it and laced their fingers together, and his fingers were rigid too, like Nicke’s, unnatural, obviously artificial. How lonely must he have been, before he’d met Nicke? Nicke understood this, the waiting, because he’d done it himself, too, waited his share, even if he hadn’t known what he was waiting for... He’d realized it was this.

“Yes,” Nicke said, a few beats too late, but Sasha didn't look like he was about to chastise him for it, or to remind him of his reaction speed. He looked like family. He looked like home. He recalibrated his voice and tried again. “I’m glad you came here to live.”

Sasha squeezed his hand, a little harder than most humans would. “I’m glad too,” he said. “Now we can do it together.”

 o     o  
 \  /

There was a designated room in the military complex that they kept Nicke in, where he had a bed, a table, and a toilet. They had given him books: the kind that you give to little human children—the ones that teach morality, or washed-down, simplified versions of history. It’s not as though they’ve managed to keep Nicke’s life sterile from cruelty, so Nicke never knew why they bothered, really, or if they understood that other species were actually capable of higher intelligence, other than humans.

One of those books was about an alien that came to abduct human children for experimentation. Nicke would laugh at it, if he could, but mostly he’d just found himself ripping it up into shreds, and then folding those bits of paper into origami, like he saw the guards at his door do occasionally, when they thought he wasn’t looking.

He’d tried to engage in conversation with them, at some point: _Do you have a family? Children? What are they like?_ He tried to talk to them for hours. They must have been given instructions not to tell him anything. What scared him was the fact that it was so much easier to talk to the other humans, outside the complex. He’d shaken their hands and said hello and didn’t point out how cold he felt, and just blamed it on the weather. They responded to his every sentence. Nicke had walked back to the complex after that, escorted, and he shoved his hands together, wondering.

 _I want to read the newspapers,_ Nicke had tried, prodding his finger into the side of one of the guards, who had looked at him briefly, and then turned away. Nicke thought that trying would have been good enough, which was one of the lessons preached over and over again in those books they gave him, and decided that he would be fine with this outcome. So he sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at the empty cell opposite his through the bars. He wondered if he was selfish for wishing that one of his podmates survived the crash with him.  

Later, when he woke up: there were papers stacked next to him in the cell. He picked them up, bundle by bundle, and amazed at how the ink smeared across his skin, dirtying up the pale pallor of his fingers. When he was younger, and had to help mine for food—he was always stained with something. It seemed like nobody was ever clean, but it wasn’t like anybody minded: he’d seen similar things outside of where they kept him, where children would fall into the dirt and had their trousers stained, mud in their fingernails. Nicke marvelled at that: how there were different conducts to be expected based on your age; how complicated it all was. He came to learn this intricately when one of the doctors took him into her house.

She had three children: most of them were around his presumed age, and all of them knew what he was. They asked him funny questions, mainly, and did not understand why, in particular, that Nicke had to be reconfigured every two hours by his mother—that he was considered as a piece of technology that would be the future. Nicke thought it was ridiculous as well, because surely whatever technology he counted as belonged to the past, where dead people lived? But he was taken into this new land, this supposedly rich, plentiful land where he has starved for longer than he’s ever had… Nicke supposed that human perception was individualistic, as a whole, down to their very existence.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke took to playing hockey easily, once he was introduced to it. It was more from a necessity than anything else; his guardian’s children wanted someone to even out the numbers when they played, and Nicke had just started passing as human, and he moved like one, too. They made him walk until he was indistinguishable. Nicke thinks that they must have taken pleasure in doing that; reforming something to supposed perfection, grinding all his sharp edges off so that looking at him wouldn’t hurt.

“You’re really good at this, you know?” Oscar, the youngest, had told him, his head peeking out of the hallway to check if his mother was around, ready with her retractors, her pliers. Nicke shrugged at him, and gave him his best expression, which was blank. And then he thought further about it, and said, “Don’t tell your mother.”

Oscar patted his arm. “Of course not,” he said, like he had any idea what his mother did to Nicke on a daily basis at all. Maybe he did. Nicke wasn’t sure which was worse: the fact that everybody knew, and no one cared enough to interfere, or if it was seen as ultimately necessary. Maybe even good. He felt like chiding himself: he has spent too long on Earth to keep hoping. He should have known better, by then. He has read their literature and watched them. He has reported their behaviours and the reasons for them, standing nude in a stainless steel room as they went through lists. But even then Nicke couldn't claim to understand wholly… everybody operated according to their own whims. Their own desires. They were all so complicated, but it felt so simple at the same time. Just an act reacted and reacted again. He’d read about how they treated their own kind. Nicke was never an anomaly… He was just another nearly forgettable part of a very human history.

“Why not?” Nicke asked.

Oscar responded with silence. Nicke watched him—the clear brightness of his eyes, his head leaning onto the side of the cupboard as Oscar watched back serenely, like he was trying to make out what to think of Nicke. It almost hurt to be observed like that, but Nicke let him look. It reminded him of when the storms died down, a little, and a fresh wash of snow dusted over the land; how Nicke would poke his head out of the cellar to squint in the brightness, crawling up the ladder to sprawl onto the snow, feeling how thick it was, how there was nothing to eat but pure nature, how Nicke had to follow the other survivors with his pickaxe, how they made him look up at the stars to hopefully find food, how, over time, they resorted to digging up anything just to sate their hunger… What was Oscar sating, then? His curiosity? The need to stimulate his intelligence? Questions left unanswered when they’d sneak into Nicke’s room to watch their mother push the cogs into his organs?

When he opened his mouth, finally, it was painfully simple, and almost not what Nicke was looking for: “Because I want you to keep playing.”

“Do you think she’d stop me?” Nicke asked.

“I don’t know,” said Oscar.

“Me neither,” said Nicke. “Hopefully she wouldn’t. It’s nice.”

Oscar smiled at him, lit up, organic, almost unbearably lifelike. “I’m happy there’s something you like doing,” he said. “I know it could get boring if all you did was go out and watch people.”

Nicke’s breath hitched. It was an imperceptible thing; mostly muscle memory by now. Nicke didn’t need to breathe. He just had to act like he did. “It is,” he said, over the whirring sounds of his own body. “I wish they’d let me do anything else.”

Oscar’s smile dimmed into something a little softer. Nicke would say that he looked like his curiosity was sated, but that wasn’t right; he looked more like a strange sort of relief to finally having something. “Like hockey?”

“Yeah,” he echoed. Nicke gave him his best smile. “Like hockey.”

 o     o  
 \  /

Sasha likes to keep an alien headband by his bedside table: he claims it’s for emergencies, if emergencies counted as Nicke being upset by a myriad of things: storms, bad games, white laboratory coats. He hides himself in their underground bunker when the rain is particularly heavy, and Nicke would never admit to this, but it helps to see Sasha bounding down the stairs with badly-painted pipe cleaners on his head disguised as antennae. He has copies. They’re all hideous, but it makes Nicke wish the humans gave him crying, that he has an outlet somehow, to cry with Sasha if he wanted to.

Nicke had been calculating how long the supply could’ve lasted him when Sasha came clanging down into the bunker to find him, the headband sitting backwards on his scalp, and when Nicke looked up to the sound and saw him, he had banged his head too hard against the wall from laughing.

“What the fuck is on your head?” Nicke had transmitted, the signals coming out all wrong, distorted from Nicke’s sudden, welcomed glee. “It looks so fucking bad.” He had continued laughing for a long, hard while, and Sasha had stood there smiling down at where Nicke sat, pressing his hands to his stomach as he giggled. Sasha had looked so proud, his cheeks flushing a bright green, and Nicke had always loved him best like this, delighted, almost glowing with it.

“Hello,” said Sasha finally, tweaking his two pipe cleaners to twitch as he talked, “I am lost and don’t know where I am.”

Nicke threw his blanket in Sasha’s direction, and said aloud, “This is your house.”

Sasha squinted at him, and then wriggled his counterfeit antennae again. “Handsome man, will you let me stay for the night?”

“We sleep together.”

Sasha gave up the act and flopped onto Nicke, a great, big lumbering thing sprawled on top of the space the two of them ought to be too big for, but fit just right. “How scandalous,” Sasha said, and then he pulled back to brush his lips against Nicke’s forehead, so light it was almost imperceptible. “But please sleep with me forever, so that when I open my eyes every morning, I’ll have motivation to get up because I’m in heaven.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Sasha, you know this.”

“Got me into your pants, didn’t it,” said Sasha, which made Nicke laugh, even if it was never really the truth. He tucked Nicke under his chin, a gesture so painfully familiar Nicke couldn’t help but shiver: sometimes the fire went out and the bunkers back home would be draped in darkness again, and his earliest memory was this—smothering himself into someone else’s skin for comfort as the wind howled above and all around them—and Nicke felt fear then, too, but at least he knew that it was going to be okay. They’d sat there then, for a few minutes of silence, and Nicke wasn’t sure if anything would ever be okay again, even with the both of them together, but he felt like he was at least ready for it, Sasha’s hand stroking circles into his back, his dirt-stained skin rubbing against Nicke’s face.

“We’ll be okay,” promised Sasha. 

“Yeah,” said Nicke, even if he didn’t believe it. Sasha wrapped a blanket around him. Nicke pressed his hands onto Sasha’s body, feeling the muscle there, his softness, the scars. He listened to him respire. How calmly he breathed underneath Nicke.

Halloween came about like this, too—the whole roster showed up with those terrible pipe cleaners at the greenhouse; green body paint smeared all over their skin. Nicke knew that if he promised them entry, it meant that most of their furniture would be stained, too, but he was too busy trying to hold in a smile at Andre, Tom and Latts, dressed in green spandex, their garish-yellow antennae bouncing with their every step.

“Beep, boop,” sung Latts, in his best robotic voice. Nicke rolled his eyes and let the three of them stockpile onto him, because there was really nothing else to do at this point. Nicke huffed against the ground.

“You guys should have put antenna on the plants too,” said Tom, almost sagely. “They’d look so cute. We should have tied bow ties around the stems for costumes.”

“Please do not do anything to the babies,” Nicke told them, “Sasha would eat all of you for breakfast.”

Andre hummed on top of him. “He doesn’t eat anything, though.”

“He can,” Nicke said. “He just doesn’t need to. Sasha can eat your rubbish human food just fine.”

“Is meat really that bad?” Andre wondered.

“You don’t understand,” Nicke mumbled, and as the three brats finally crawled off each other to let Nicke stand, TJ had managed to find Sasha for a piggyback ride, the both of them slamming into Nicke again at the worst possible timing.

“This is a fucking mess,” said Nicke, although he felt like he was about to burst from that warm, aching feeling, “We’re going to have so much to clean today.”

“I know,” said Sasha, somewhere to Nicke’s right. Nicke grasped around for his hand, and then there it was, his fingers curling around Nicke’s, his thumb rubbing against his knuckles. “We’ll make them stay to help us.” 

 o     o  
 \  /

The humans make a lot of assumptions about Sasha, but Nicke would never forget this:

Sasha finished with sweeping up the glass shards of their broken windows, where something was carried by the winds to crash into their house. He’d picked up the shards one by one, off the leaves of the fatsia, from the cacti Nicke had amassed by the balcony. He was washing the sap off his hands, where they cut into the fingers, running water over his flesh, waiting for them to heal… The plants had somehow withered in their absence. Sometimes they did that; despite Sasha hiring people to care for them. Nicke could somehow understand—there was always a kind of magic to Sasha that eluded you, but made sure you were well looked after, that you were loved. But this storm was harsh; a violent one that had scared Nicke on the flight home, and dimly he’d known that the windows back home weren’t strong enough for it.

Sasha had crumpled in the face of their house when they came back, at the shrunken leaves, and the wreckage, kneeling to touch the soil that had completely dried up. “I’m sorry,” Nicke had said, but it sounded empty as Sasha knelt there. He watched him empty the pots that hadn’t shattered into garbage bags, the black plastic stark against Sasha’s greyed skin, lifting the plants from where they’d laid from the floor, resting against the brim. Nicke would have helped, but he was certain that was what Sasha wouldn’t have wanted him to do; so he watched him instead, offering water every ten minutes to watch him sip at it blankly.

Nicke could barely look at the house when Sasha was done, all their plants in neatly tied up bags—it was so empty. It almost didn’t look like home, if not for Sasha harshly rubbing water at his skin to recuperate, his lips pressed into a faint grey line. Nicke wished the sun would be back, so that Sasha wouldn’t be that colour—it looked wrong on him, to be this lifeless, when Nicke had always reveled in how it seemed like light was dancing in him most days, the way he looked at Nicke.

“You want me to throw them out?” Nicke asked, hesitating for a second before he’d put his arms around him, gripping as tightly as he’d wanted. “I can do it.”

Sasha sagged. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” He turned the tap off. “Need to get new windows.”

“I’ll do that too,” Nicke told him, and Sasha turned, a faint line in between his eyebrows, although the grey in his skin receded a little, and Nicke leaned in to kiss him chastely, a simple thing that Sasha could have pushed away if he’d wanted to. “We can always rebuild.”

Sasha smiled bitterly, and his eyes grew damp. “Not always,” he reminded Nicke.

“Yes,” Nicke allowed. “But we can, this time.” He took Sasha’s hand. The wounds have already begun to close. The sap is washed clean off his fingers. They stood there for a while, holding hands, watching the storm blow in, the rain pouring into their living room, the dark weather relentless outside. Nicke knew it would stop, at some point—they just had to wait until it was over, and then Sasha could bring him to the garden centres, the nurseries, filling his tiny cars in with his new plants, the smaller pots stacked in Nicke’s lap…

Silently, Nicke took him upstairs to their bedroom, peeling him out of the clothes that stuck wetly to his skin, tugging him into the shower where they stood, the water beating down on them, until Sasha reached out behind Nicke to turn the water hotter, making Nicke snort and bury his face into Sasha’s shoulder.

“Don’t know why humans want their fake rain to be so lukewarm,” Sasha muttered, as if any of them had a normal outlook on what ‘lukewarm’ meant—for starters, Nicke couldn’t sense temperature, and he didn’t know what it was despite searching it up in the dictionary, online, wherever.

“They’re just weak, Sasha,” explained Nicke, “Don’t mind them.”

“They have weird expectations of what showers should be.”

“I think _our_ expectations are the weird ones,” said Nicke. “But don’t tell any of them I said that.”

Sasha squeezed his hip. “I thought you were on my side,” he said.

“I am,” said Nicke. “I’m always on your side, even if I hate showers.”

“I know,” Sasha said, and smiled at him, a small, tender thing that returned some of the green to his skin. “Good for me.”

“Good for you,” Nicke agreed, even if he thought that it was very much the other way round, and pinned him against the wall to kiss him, the steam fogging up the air around them, making it hard to breathe; but it wasn’t as if either of them needed to. Nicke didn’t require oxygen, Sasha photosynthesised—if they spent hours in here doing nothing but touching each other, nobody would know.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke wakes up in a hospital bed. He’s wearing those clothes that they give patients, the ones that have stayed there for a while. His whole unit is covered in flowers, but only some of them are Sasha’s—Nicke can tell, at this point, which plants that Sasha have grown. He’s oddly shocked by the number of greeting cards he can see, pinned to the flowers, the stems. Sasha has fallen asleep on the chair beside him. He’s holding his hand.

“Sasha?” Nicke calls. It takes a while; he has forgotten what it feels like to speak. He squeezes their fingers together. “You there?”

Sasha’s eyes open sleepily, slitting open like a big cat’s. “Nicke?” He says, a soft, quiet thing, until his eyes widen, the grey completely overtaken by the green in his excitement. “You’re awake.”

Nicke hums. He can feel his body working again, when he moves, and he takes in the differences as he sits up. The flickering greenness in Sasha’s skin.

“I was worried about you,” Sasha says.

“I’m sorry,” Nicke says. He remembers the way Sasha had pressed his hands all over him, the desperation, how lightly he spoke to Nicke, like he could break from a few words, like he was fragile, like Sasha was afraid of hurting him somehow. “I was going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I guess I don’t,” Nicke concedes. “They would have remade me somehow, you know.”

Sasha looks shocked.

“What,” Nicke asks. “They would have.”

“Nothing,” Sasha says, and then he sits on the bed beside Nicke, even if there’s really not that much space, curling down to kiss him, where Nicke laid, softer than anything Nicke has ever felt. “I wouldn’t want them to remake you. How many times can they fuck up?”

Nicke clutches at his arm and sighs. “I don’t know. System maintenance. Updates. I don’t know what you’d call it.”

Sasha looks at him for a long time. “Experimentation,” he says. “Science. Technology. Research for artificial intelligence.”  

Nicke doesn’t respond. He looks back to the perimeters of the room, where the plants have gathered by the walls, manicured and pruned and nearly unnatural. Nicke thinks that they’ll be able to grow again, if they take them home. If they let Nicke go home. He touches his hips, feeling the new skin that they have given him. He wonders if Sasha would hate it the way he did when he was younger, when they were cutting into him every few hours to fix up his organs and flesh, to sew him back together, as if at the tailors. He wants to go home. He wants to look into the mirror and see what they have done to him again.

The windows are open. Nicke can see the hospital courtyard from where he’s lying down. Sasha is still curled on top of him, watching, his grey-green eyes damp; he might be crying, he might be about to cry. It’s the first time they’ve gone through this. It would be his first time seeing the disfigured patches, the modifications to his body. He will be the one to see Nicke fall over and over again from not knowing his own body, although… it hasn’t been his own body in a long time. Nicke hates the prospect of it, of having Sasha see him nearly unable to eat from the dissonant pain. He almost wishes they had him back. At least he wasn’t afraid of hurting anyone like that.

“Sasha,” Nicke says. “I want to go home.”

Sasha tucks a lock of Nicke’s hair behind his ear, patting down his antennae where Nicke likes them. “Soon,” he says. “I want to go home too.”

Nicke sucks in a sharp breath. “I’m going to be—difficult.”

“I’d rather have you be difficult than dead,” says Sasha.

Nicke looks away, but Sasha tilts his chin back with two fingers. “We’ve always been difficult people,” Sasha reminds him, cutting back from Swedish to Russian. “It’s not the end of the world. You know what the end of the world is. This isn’t it.”

“I know,” Nicke says, pressing his lips together. Sasha understands, but Nicke wants to tell him how it hurts, how it feels like to have your insides dug out like food, how he hates forgetting how to walk, how to move, even if he catches up, even if he finds a way. He flexes his antennae and wishes he still had a use for them. He wishes they didn’t hurt him so much.

“I love you,” Sasha says, almost desperate. “You know this?”

“Yeah,” Nicke says. “I do. I know. I love you too.”

“Sometimes I’m terrified the world will end,” Sasha says, swallowing. “And you won’t be there anymore.”

“Sasha,” Nicke says, voice electronic, and he wants to move, wants to put his arms around him, but his body won’t let him, he’s stuck.

“But then—this, and I think, I think they might take you away from me even with the world going okay. The world doesn’t have to end for me to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me,” says Nicke, but he pauses, and then rephrases: “I’ll try my hardest for you not to lose me.”

“But I could still lose you anyway.”

Nicke struggles a little while more, and then he manages it, awkwardly, hugging Sasha with as much energy as he could muster. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m still here.”

Sasha breathes out unsteadily, and then he starts to cry, tears running down his cheeks, and Nicke wants to wipe them off, he really does, but he couldn’t move again, his arms immobile as they hovered around Sasha. That was the thing about them opening him up, about always opening Nicke up—sometimes he couldn’t remember how to function, afterwards, and he’d stay in his little cell in the midst of motion, and the guards would come up to the cell and talk to him like he wasn’t listening, like some kind of statue, about how they wished that they could’ve let him go, about how he could live a normal, regular life out there—but Nicke couldn’t live one ever since they’d cut into him and dug his innards out and replaced everything with metal and circuits and processors. Nicke has never hated what they did to him more than he does now, even with all his anger and bitterness, about how even after all of this they couldn’t make him function. Privately Nicke rejoiced at how they didn’t touch him for years… but he should have known. He did know. He just didn’t want to face it.

“You won’t be here forever,” says Sasha, finally, and Nicke could feel his breath, how he struggles to breathe as he cries, moving backwards to help Nicke lay his arms back onto the bed, by his sides, the pressure lifting off the mattress as he leaves.

 o     o  
 \  /

The doctor shows up, when Sasha’s gone home for the evening.

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Nicke says, stupidly exposed under her gaze. He’s lying down on a bed, not a table. Her hands are empty. A visitor badge dangles in front of her torso as she leans down to look at him, pressing parts on Nicke’s body that only she understands.

“I heard about what happened,” she says.

Nicke lets her lift the hem of his shirt up. “Maybe you can tell me about it,” he says, laughing, but it doesn’t sound human, coming out of him, and especially not in front of her. He wonders how her children are doing. Have they grown? Has she sent them off to university, to work; has she looked after them well? Do they still remember him, slapping pucks into their makeshift nets; do they watch him play all the way back where home was supposed to be?

“Just some complications with your build,” she says simply. He looks into her green eyes, her blonde hair. How he looks so painfully similar to her—ordinary, Swedish, his thin lips pale like everything else about him. He sees her when he looks into the mirror. He’s seeing her now, clinical and motherly. She wants to rewire him. Nicke thinks about going home after her, his body shutting down, the switches somewhere that she has tailored for herself. An in. She will always have access to his body, if she wanted it.

Nicke wonders how he should feel about being a failed pet project.

He looks up at her and meets her eyes.

“What’s this I hear about you not cooperating?”

“It’s what it sounds like,” Nicke tells her, refusing to look away. “Did I have to answer their questions? They’re not even Swedish.”

“Neither are you.”

Nicke stares resolutely back at her.

“You need to—you need to help them, here,” she tries, squeezing his hand. Nicke almost cannot feel it, with how numb he is all over, with the needles she has inserted into his forefingers.

Nicke grits his teeth and keeps listening.

“You’re a diplomat, of a sort,” she says. “Don’t you know this?”

“I do,” Nicke says. “Which countries interrogate their diplomats, anyway?”

“Many countries do.”

“Do they.” Nicke tilts his head on the pillow, facing her as much as he can. This isn’t his first time meeting his maker, but it’s the first time in years; years since he’d moved out of her house, years since he left to play professional hockey. It’s been years since a person had took him by the hand into his house and taught him how to grow plants, to watch the organic shape of them climb higher amongst the walls. Sometimes they withered, and were thrown away. Nicke understands this, perhaps more than anything else. He wonders what he should feel now. He wants her to love him. He wants to believe she is here to bring him home again; to fix him. To fix this horrible feeling. He wants to believe, but he knows better. Nicke looks back into her eyes and tries again: “I’m more of a refugee than a diplomat, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” she says easily. She holds his hand, like she might have held any of her children’s hand, and removes the needles. Nicke doesn’t understand her tranquilizers. He never thought it was necessary. They shouldn’t have been… Nicke hadn’t tried to hurt anybody in his life before. He tried to explain this to them. He tried to make them understand. As much as they changed him… he’s still incapable of violence. He didn’t even know how to run away.

“You could just give them all the information you had on me,” says Nicke. “Don’t you think it’d be easier?”

“Maybe,” she says. “But it’s also easier they can’t get the answers.”

Nicke flexes his fingers. “I thought you wanted them to.” He pauses. “Listen. I can’t keep talking about a place that I don’t know anymore. I don’t remember it. You—you think I wanted to forget? You think I wanted to come here and offer nothing? It’s gone now. You’re looking for a place that doesn’t exist. All of you are searching for information that isn’t there.”  

She touches his face. Her palm, calloused and dry, slides over his face and into his hair, terrifyingly soothing. Nicke wants Sasha back. He just has to hold out. He just has to wait until he can go to the greenhouse again.

“Child,” she says. “You didn’t know anything when you came. So why would you now?” She kisses his forehead like a benediction. “Silly child. We didn’t want to know about where you came from. We wanted to know how to keep you alive.”

Nicke blanches. “So why ask me.”

“It’s a way to remind you of what you are.” She looks pitying. “It would be terrible if you’d forgotten.”

“I would never forget,” says Nicke, as vehemently as he can: even as he starts whirring, his whole body going into overdrive; “How could I forget? Why would I forget what all of you have done to me?”

“That’s one reason,” she says. “The Americans want to know what we’ve done to you. What we’ve found out. They’re waiting for you to tell them.”

Nicke inhales, shuddering. “You don’t want me to tell them,” he points out.

“You won’t,” she says. “You have too much love in you. Too much pride. You want to be human too much for all this…” She circles her wrist and gestures towards the distance between him and her. “You’re not stupid. You know what would happen if you told them. If everybody knows... You know how bad the Americans are at keeping secrets.”

Nicke curls up on himself. He shuts his dry, painful eyes as tightly as he can.

“But we still need you to feed them something.”

“Of course,” Nicke says. He doesn’t know what to do with his eyes: where to look, who to watch out for; if he should stare down the two soldiers she had brought with her, armed, ready to shoot. “Of course.”

“You can still live your life with him,” she reminds him, gently, because she knew how to do that: to be kind; and this was what Nicke struggled with most of all. That in each their own way they were trying to live, and sometimes it meant destroying someone else over it. “Your lover. He’s like you, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Nicke says. He’s terrified of saying anything else. “I love him.”

“Good that you have something to love,” she says, and pats his hand. “Remember what I told you.” She stands up and shrugs her blazer on, that same white, pristine ugliness that Nicke detests.

But Nicke cannot help but ask. He thinks it would kill him if he didn’t: “Will you come see me again?” He wishes he doesn’t sound this hopeful.

“We really made you too kind,” she says, as if they were the ones that had fashioned him a personality on top of a mouth, his whole body, the life they abandoned him to lead. She sighs at him like a disappointed parent. “Why would you possibly want that?”

 o     o  
 \  /

The whole team is there the day that Nicke gets discharged. It’s so messy; they keep bringing Nicke things.

“That’s at least 10 phones,” proclaims Andre, who has put himself in charge of stacking all of Nicke’s food up into little pyramids. “Papa, how many phones do you eat in one day, typically?”

“Secret,” says Nicke. “I can’t let you know this information.”

TJ laughs terribly loudly. “We all know you eat as many as you can get your hands on.”

Nicke grumbles. “Maybe,” he says. “Look, how would you like it if I dangled food in front of your noses everyday?”

“Like what kind of food,” asks TJ.

“I don’t fucking know,” says Nicke. “Anything you like to eat. Chicken corpses.”

Latts and Tom snort at that, and Nicke drops his bags onto their laps. There are way too many things to bring home; and most of them are all the flowers and plants that have made their way here. And then there are the phones and the laptops and the gaming consoles, beautifully growing in a corner where Nicke had stared at the whole time he was in. Anything that can be added to his stash is magnificent.

“I resent your weird names for human food,” says Holts. “Beef carcass? Chicken corpses?”

“Is that not what you’re eating?” Nicke asks. “Fish remains? You catch these poor things and swallow their flesh, wow.”

“Humans are omnivorous! It’s a thing in nature!” Tom says, hauling one of the gigantic plants out of the room, contorting his body to squeeze through the doorframe.

“What does that make Papa, then?” Andre asks.

Nicke shrugs. “Is it possible to be an honorary plant? Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment recycling is such a mouthful.” He pauses, and then thinks about it a little. “I’d like to be a cactus.”  

Sasha pokes his head into the room. “Cactus?”

“Yes,” says Holts. “Your boyfriend wants to be one.”

“Is it because he’s so prickly? Good choice.” Sasha grins toothily. “Andre, stuff all the phones in your shirt or something, because we’d better get going. Give one to Nicke.”

Nicke gladly bites into the phone as he follows the team out, leaving the room bare and clinical again. He’s excited to go home and see the plants, to check on how they’re doing, or to go to his bunker and add everything that’s accumulated in that tiny hospital room where there’s not enough sunlight for Sasha to turn a bright green, like he does at home. He looks forward to the windows and transparency of everything, watching the team argue about delivery despite all of them earning enough to buy everything they want. Most of all, he looks forward to joining Sasha as he sprawls on the rug in the middle of the living room, snacking on one of the chargers that Dima doesn’t know Nicke’s stolen from him yet.

“I’m so happy to be back,” Nicke says, circling his arms around Sasha on the porch as he unlocks the front door. “I’ve missed this place.” He looks to all the people that has gathered here, scattered throughout their house like they belong. “Being in hospital was terrible.”

“Of course,” says Sasha, pressing their mouths together. He looks dimly happy, even if exhaustion looks like it’s lighting him for the inside; like there’s something he needs to say.

But Nicke knows how hard it is to tell secrets. He has so many of them stored inside of him. He used to imagine being able to tell someone who would understand, but it can’t come out of his mouth… He’s spent so long guarding them that it’s locked inside of him now, and sometimes they stay there in a bottomless well, tucked safely away.

“Let’s never leave,” Nicke asks of him, even if it’s impossible, even if they have to run away from here someday. They will never let them both go; but Nicke likes to pretend that they had a choice, at least, and wanted to stick to it. “I don’t want to leave this place.” He looks into the house, where everybody has sprawled somewhere, safe and happy and in no rush to go home. Some of them will leave the team, as so many of them had, but they’re here, for now. For now, he’ll be able to bury his face into Sasha’s shoulder and pretend, just for a little bit, like the world is permanent.

Sasha wraps his arms around him, hugging him so tightly that it ought to hurt. But Sasha has never hurt him. Nicke doesn’t think he ever would… As flawed as Nicke’s body is, it seems just right for Sasha, who knows when to hold his hand or where to touch him. His body is delicate, but it doesn’t seem like it when Sasha’s touching him. He doesn’t need to be held and comforted, but it’s nice to be treated this way, as much as Nicke doesn’t need it. He remembers trying to speak when he first came. He remembers how loudly he had to broadcast, how it never worked; how, when it came down to it, he had learned how to move; how to hold his new hands in front of him, pleading for them to stop. 

He doesn’t move like Sasha, who moves fluidly, who’s talented at it, who looks good, taking up all of your space and then some more; he touches people like it’s his birthright, hugging, bestowing kisses onto cheeks, flirting with everything he comes across. Had someone taught him how to move like that? Did he practice? It seems so dissimilar to the way Nicke moves, jarring and nearly incomplete, like his actions are all out of order. He keeps reminding himself to speak and move, as if a puppeteer—but being with Sasha means forgetting. He doesn’t have to act human, even if he craves to be touched like one. He doesn’t have to understand the language that Sasha speaks in to know he loves him when he pushes Nicke to fall on top of him, holding him there and never letting go. Nicke doesn’t need to try and decipher everything he says… It’s just there. It’s a language nobody had to teach him.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nobody wanted to tell him about Sasha. They had talked about him in front of Nicke, when they thought he wasn’t listening—little details about where the Russians had stationed him. Nicke had laid very still on the table and pretended like he was shut down, his eyes closed, hands by his sides. _A lot about him is classified information; we don’t have any of the details._ They talked about sending Nicke over to Russia, for brief periods of time—like books you borrowed from the library.

Nicke wanted them to. He wanted to know this other non-human beyond evaluations, to strip him off numbers and data like he’d wished someone would do to him. He wanted to lose humanity for a little while, and if it meant Siberia, then he would have gone gladly.

“Send me there,” Nicke told them, in a fit of frustration. They had modified his body so many times that Nicke wasn’t sure if he could even remember how to skate. “You’re not making any progress, anyway, so why don’t you let the Russians have a turn?” which earned him a slap across his face. It didn’t leave a mark, like slaps did in the movies—Nicke’s face had no red handprint, no bruises to surface after a few days. Yet it had hurt more than anything they ever did to him, even if it meant them acknowledging what he’d said.

“I want to know,” he’d insisted, sitting in front of the television, watching hockey plays. They treated him differently, once it was found out that he was supernaturally good at hockey—which was laughable; Nicke didn’t understand how human standards were only applicable to him in cases that they shouldn’t have mattered. “Let me know him.” He considered begging, the way that people would go their knees in church. “Couldn’t you tell me anything about him?”

They tilted their heads at him, as if they couldn’t understand why. It was just preposterous to Nicke… how they had given him a very human body to exist in a very human world, but refused to take the leap of considering him, in some aspects, as human, too. He wondered what they would have done in his position. What they would do when backed into a corner.

One of them gave him a file, after that. Nicke memorized all the information that they would spare him—they hadn’t included much. He was uncooperative, to a degree. Prone to emotion. On Sundays, he would be followed to the park where he stayed for hours. He liked to play hockey, like Nicke… He was good at it.

Nicke wondered at this other person, existing alongside him. If he loved anything; if he gave himself a name the way Nicke did—if he was as fluent in Russian as Nicke was with Swedish. He wanted to know him. He wanted to know if they were cruel to him, too, to share all their negligible secrets that meant nothing to nobody on this planet except for him. 

 o     o  
 \  /

The boys come to visit him often. They’re always sitting by the bed, watching him sleep—it’s kind of creepy, if not cute, because they refuse to deal with Nicke’s hunger and sleepiness at the same time and have to resort to entertaining themselves in ways that do not involve electronics.

He wakes up to Andre _reading a book_.

“Are you _reading_ ,” Nicke squints at him, after he has blinked hard enough to know that he isn’t asleep or hallucinating. “What the fuck.”

“Papa,” Andre whines. “I read things all the time; don’t do this to me.”

“Since when did you read?” Nicke asks. “Since when can you read?”

“That’s not very nice,” Andre sniffs. “I just bought my phone, since you ate the last one, and I don’t want to buy another phone again.”

Nicke rolls his eyes at him. “You can afford it,” he points out. “Just let me eat your current one, and you can buy another.”

“No!” Andre yelps, but then he relaxes a second later. “I left my phone at home, anyway, so I can’t give you that.” He fishes for his bag from under the bed. “I brought you my cables, though.”

“Good enough,” Nicke says, and extends his hand, where Andre dutifully deposits at least fifty metres of cables. Nicke wants to ask where he gets them from, but decides he’s better off not asking.

Andre closes his book, left open on the bed, and sets it on the table to climb in next to Nicke, who raises an eyebrow at him.

“What.”

“You didn’t even leave a bookmark,” Nicke says.

“Whatever, whatever,” Andre mumbles, and stretches beside Nicke. “Are you feeling better now? Ovi has been desolate for way too long.”

“He’s not been  _desolate_ ,” says Nicke. “He’s downstairs now, isn’t he, happily talking to the babies?”

“Not _happily_.”

“Semi-happily?”

Andre props himself up on his elbows. “He’s very concerned for you,” he announces, which is very cute, coming from a perpetually adorable ten year old. “He worries about the stairs. That it’s difficult for you to climb down.”

Nicke can’t help but soften at that. “I’ll cope.”

“We know,” Andre says. He inches closer to Nicke. “Did they say when you can skate again?”

“Depends on whatever they need to change,” Nicke says. “It’s not as easy as human bones, you know? They changed a lot of my biology.”

“Oh,” says Andre, as Nicke curls the wires around each other and bites into them blissfully. “That’s…” He looks mortified. “In Sweden?”

“Yeah,” says Nicke. “It’s okay, though.”

“Ovi said…”

Nicke watches him, but Andre drops off mid-sentence, his eyes straying to where Nicke’s antennae lies.

“What did he say?” Nicke prompts.

“Nothing, really. The both of you don’t talk about it much. Just that, you know. Not too disturb you too much.”

“Right.”

“So we brought you food,” Andre perks up. “Like, a lot of food.”

“I know,” Nicke says. He squeezes Andre’s arm. “I noticed. All of you didn’t have to.”

“We wanted to,” Andre says. “We just want to help, you know?”

Nicke smiles at him. “I appreciate it,” he says, as sincerely as he can manage. “Sasha appreciates it, too.”

Nate pokes his head into the room. “Nicky,” he says. “Your boyfriend is trying to make you a cake out of Nokia phones, but it’s not working.”

“Tell him not to be too ambitious. You can’t stack six of them on top of one another _and_ bring everything upstairs on a plate,” Nicke says to Nate’s bewildered, but ever-smiling face. “Remind him of the time where he tried to make a sculpture out of batteries.”

Andre sighs. “You’re still going to have the stomach left for all my cables, right?”

Nicke can’t help but burst into laughter at Andre’s indignity of being one-upped by Sasha. “Of course,” he says, placating, but he’s smiling too hard, his lips stretching at the corners, thinking about Sasha downstairs with the rest of the team, doing stupidly idiotic things. “I have the stomach for everything.”  

 o     o  
 \  /

In late September, Sasha sits down next to him in the garden, draping a blanket over his shoulders. He’ll have to sit out the pre-season matches for his injuries, but it doesn’t seem too bad to Nicke. Logically he understands that he really is not human, after all, but healing processes do still apply to him. The pain of being alive, Nicke thinks. He looks towards Sasha and tangles their hands together.

Nicke says, “I don’t understand why you try and cover me with blankets all the time.” He waits until Sasha turns to look at him. “You know that I don’t feel warmth.”

“I know,” says Sasha. “But it’s nice to have something around you. You can feel it, hear it, touch it…” He looks wistful for an achingly long moment. “Good to indulge the senses. You know how hedonistic I am.”

Nicke hums. _Are you_? He wants to ask, but he holds it in, looking at his mud-stained feet, at the leaves that have caught in his sweater. If there was a picture of warmth, Nicke is certain that Sasha is it, in this moment. “Nothing wrong with hedonism.” 

Sasha kisses his knuckles, a fleeting, soft thing. “I could almost guess what you’re trying to say.”

“Could you.”

Sasha picks up a fallen flower and weaves it into the hair by his antennae. “Sure,” he says. “Lots of ways to communicate that don’t involve touching fancy signals.” 

“I guess so,” Nicke says, and lets them fall silent for a while, staring up at the sky. The stars are out, but Nicke doesn’t feel the urge to go back to the telescope; not with Sasha here, his legs outstretched and all his focus on that specific direction Nicke is all too familiar with. Some days, Nicke could almost promise that he knows what Sasha looked like, before—could almost see it—his electric green eyes, his sprawling under the thick trees he favours, the fightless, almost noble life he had. If it means giving this back to Sasha; Nicke would risk not having known him. He would have risked not watching him on a blurry television screen back in Gavlë.

Nicke stares at the ground beneath him. How easy it is to chip away the dirt. He never had anything like that back home; nothing so soft and pliant. Nothing as giving as Sasha is. 

“I miss talking, sometimes,” Nicke says, distracting himself for that brief little while.

“I miss _not_ talking.”

Nicke bites down his laughter, and lets Sasha kiss him loudly on the cheek. “You understand what I mean.”

“Yes,” Sasha says. “There’s a lot to miss, too. From back home.” He sighs. “A lot of them… We knew we wouldn’t last. So we tried to explore everything. Made sure we remembered before we go.” 

Nicke pauses. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t,” Nicke says, hurting with the admission of it. “I don’t remember much.”  

“I don’t know if it’d make you feel better if you did,” says Sasha. “If you had home inside here,” he tucks away a few strands of Nicke’s hair behind his ear. “All the time. It’s not easy… But I know it’s not easy, either way. But you live with it now. A byproduct. They can’t erase it from you.”

“I feel like they have.”

“But you’re here,” says Sasha, “And you’re mine. Even though they took everything away from me, and then I had nothing. And now I have you.”

“A history.”

“Sure,” Sasha shrugs. “It lives inside of you. In your brain. Heart. Whichever you believe in more.”

“I don’t have a heart,” Nicke reminds him. “Nor a brain, in the traditional sense.”

“Me neither,” says Sasha. “But I think… if I had one, you would be it.”

“Your brain?”

Sasha barks out a laugh. “Fuck you, no. A heart.”

Nicke can’t help but smile at him, a terrible thing that must take up his entire face, lighting him up with it: he won’t be surprised if he suddenly started glowing in the dark. “Yeah. I’m sorry I ruined your efforts to be romantic.” 

“I know you’re a secret romantic deep down, Lars,” Sasha says. “It’s okay.”

“I am,” Nicke says. “I think you have to be to survive this far. I keep thinking of them… If they would have wanted me to do anything else. Like I’m carrying a piece of everyone with me. For as long as we have.” He squeezes Sasha’s hand back. “For as long as I have.”

“Like an inheritance.”

“Maybe,” says Nicke. “I just don’t know if I’m the right one to have it. It’s a lot to bear.”

“Yeah.” 

“But they wouldn’t know now, would they?” Nicke asks. “Or maybe—with this far away, they’re still there. Earth is a long way from home. Maybe I still exist in the sky above us.” 

“You exist here, too. That’s the difficult part.”

“And now it’s all onto me,” Nicke says. “Me and you.”

“You wanted someone else?” Sasha asks, jokingly. “Another robot?” 

“No.” Nicke goes back to eyeing the sky, the great, big expanse; the sky that humans have been fascinated by for so long… The sky where he came in from, and now cannot go back to. “I wanted you.” He thinks that maybe, in another life, a more fortunate, less costly life… Nicke would have wanted to be someone who studies the galaxies. “I wanted someone as kind as you.” 

“A Disney princess,” says Sasha, nonsensically, but it works, it makes Nicke laugh again, inexplicably loud.

“I prefer hockey players.”

“Are Disney princesses not muscular enough for you?”

“Disney princesses can’t make plants grow.”

“I suppose they can’t,” Sasha says.

“I love you,” Nicke says.

“I love you too.” 

“It’s so hard to know it’s worth it.” Nicke says, plucking the flower out of his hair to stare at, this beautiful, fragile, delicate thing that could never have survived where he came from—how, if Nicke wanted, he could crush very easily underneath his fingers. He has seen so much of this planet that requires gentleness. “But I know it is to be with you.” He passes the flower back to Sasha. “I remember when they first talked about you in front of me. I never thought I would find…” 

“Somebody.” 

Nicke cups his jaw, his fingertips faintly scratching at Sasha’s beard. “Anybody.” 

“But it happened, didn’t it?” Sasha asks.

“It did,” Nicke says. “I figured that the universe owed me this much.” He presses a kiss to his lips. “For what they’ve done to me. For wiping me away. I at least deserved to have you.”

 o     o  
 \  /

There’s a database of him inside the facility that Nicke grew up in. All sorts of information. Everything you could measure out of him, they did—it’s a strange feeling, to be examined like a sample, even if that’s always been the way they treated him. A little test tube of things they thought they needed to know about. He had watched them do this from the corner of the room: the measurements, the careful portions of him tucked away scientifically.

He would try and sneak looks when they weren’t looking—a scroll of the mouse here, a few illicit clicks there. Somehow it felt wrong, even if the person he was looking at was himself—photographs of him taken from different angles. Out in the open. On the ice, when he first started skating. He remembers looking through everything and always forgetting that it was himself that he was looking at; this person with barely a life and a family, who liked concrete buildings and exploring the city, when they let him. They spent a lot of money on this. They spent a lot of money on Nicke.

When he was younger, on another planet—they had to mark out the days with etchings on the walls. You had nothing to do underneath in the bunkers, and Nicke had spent half his life sleeping—dreaming of a fantastical land that resembled his home, in some ways—but a land that bore fruit; a land where you would never have to dig and scavenge for food. He would wake up and tell everybody he knew about it:  _imagine! a place you wouldn’t be afraid of dying in!_ and all his family would touch their foreheads together and bestow affection onto him, simple, nearly mindless.

He thinks that maybe Earth could have been this place, once. But all those dreams were merely that—dreams. He knows now that those dreams were futile. He knows now that there was a kind of happiness in barely surviving at the whims of nature… not of other people… But Nicke had to adapt. He had no choice. He had to clamber off the examination tables and crawl to the computers where they kept all the life in him to see what they were doing. This is what it meant to be from that planet like him, he’d thought bitterly, stealing some passer-by’s phone to stifle his hunger. This was the dream he wanted to wake up from.

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke lets the whole pack of them in with their food and alcohol and cars the day the doctors clear him for practice. There’s no point in trying to hide from them: Sasha has heard their cars down the roads a few minutes ago and has; lingering out by the porch to wave them in, a warm, dark green as he dangles from his perch atop the fence. Nicke watches him through the windows and lets the boys hang off of him as they yell in his ear.

“PAPA’S BACK!” Latts yells at the top of his lungs, holding up a bottle of wine, or something—Nicke doesn’t know. “We have to feed him with—uh—things!”

“Things,” Nicke repeats, deadpan. “I eat things, yes, Michael, you’re absolutely right.”

“To be fair,” Andre says, sitting amidst all of the flowers that Sasha has newly brought in, “You eat a wide variety of things.”

“So do all of you,” points out Nicke. “You eat leaves and drink leaf juice. I eat phones. Cameras. Cables. Batteries. Electricity.”

“That’s nice,” Willy says. “Papa should get a pool so we can all dunk him inside it.”

“Have you ever put your phone in a bathtub full of water before,” Nicke asks. “It doesn’t end well.”

Sasha raises his eyebrows as he walks back into the living room, messing up Andre’s hair on the way. “Why are we trying to drown my boyfriend in a bathtub?”

“Nobody’s trying to drown Papa,” says Willy.

“They were, actually,” Kuzya says in Russian.

“We just fixed him!” Sasha exclaims in English, and Nicke laughs and throws a sock at him, following him outside into the garden where the rest of them have set up a barbecue pit for them to feed themselves. They don’t let Nicke anywhere near it, unfortunately—until Nicke manages to sneak a look at what the fuck it is they’re grilling—old Nokia phones with the batteries removed.

Andre catches him staring at whatever monstrosity they have created. “Does it smell nice?”

“What,” Nicke says blankly. “It smells like burnt plastic.”

“Sure,” Andre says. “But does that smell nice to you?”

“Uh.”

“We’re testing out a hypothesis,” says Carly, probably already drunk off his ass on the hammock. He’s wearing sunglasses. “To see if you like your phones better when they’re grilled.”

“ _Why_.”

“Because everything tastes better when they’re grilled, Nicky,” Carly says. “Maybe you like them extra burnt. Who knows? One way to find out.”

Nicky walks over to the hammock, peering down at him. “I think you had too much to drink.”

“I can hold my alcohol,” Carly insists, but Nicke takes the bottle away from him anyway, depositing it into Dima’s hands. He seems like someone who’s more equipped to deal with whiskey at this hour of the day.

Andre comes back and pushes a whole plate of grilled phones at him. “Try it,” he says, and suddenly there’s a whole crowd of stupid hockey players gathered around Nicke, waiting for his reaction.

“I’ve never had so many people wanting me to eat a phone before,” Nicke jokes, and accepts the plate into his hands.

“It’s for your boyfriend,” says TJ. “So he can grill you phones when you get cranky. Careful, that’s—”

“I don’t feel temperature,” says Nicke, holding up the burnt phone with his fingers. “What are you talking about. It’s so that all of you will have an excuse to come over and grill things, and look at our baby plants.”

“Can you blame us. Your house is fucking awesome.”

“I know,” says Nicke, smugly, and swallows the entire phone in one bite to obnoxiously loud cheers.

“How is it?” Sasha asks, sitting underneath the shade of his favourite tree. “Better when it’s torched by fire?”

“Around the same,” Nicke says, to their team’s disappointment, although they’re already coming up with new ways to sabotage Nicke’s food. “I like the food you feed me as is, thanks.”

“Get a room!” Dima yells, and Kuzya kicks at Sasha’s legs, eager for any opportunity to harass him. “Have wild alien sex upstairs as we eat salad!”

“Nobody’s eating my fucking children,” Sasha cries, his voice shrill. “Nobody should be in this house when Nicky and I have sex!”

“You what,” Andre asks. “You have sex?”

“We do,” says Nicke.

“How?”

“I don’t think you want to know that.”

Sasha shrugs. “We have dicks,” he says, to a bewildered Andre. “They touch sometimes.”

“Wow,” says Latts. “Never thought we’d be having this conversation.”

“We have, many times,” says Kuzya. “In Russian. Lots. I know too much.”

“Because you keep _asking_ ,” groans Dima.

“Healthy curiosity,” Kuzya dismisses.

“You’re not as curious when Ovi talks to you about plants,” Nicke says.

“That’s lie,” says Kuzya. “I love plant.”

“So do I,” Nicke pipes in.

“No you don’t,” says Sasha to Kuzya.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“I made one,” says Kuzya. “I grew it myself.”

“How did that happen,” Sasha mutters.

“You wait here,” says Kuzya, and then he disappears back into the house with Nicke warily watching him through the windows, in case he steals one of the babies to make a point. He doesn’t, though, which is good—instead he comes back with a pot. With presumably something growing inside it.

“What is this,” Nicke asks. There’s a small tendril of green that’s maybe three inches tall. “What did you do to the poor thing.”

“Hey!” Kuzya twists the pot away from Nicke. “It’s my baby.”

“I’m so concerned for you,” Nicke says.

“Better than last time,” says Sasha, and pats him heartily on the back. “Good effort. I give C+.”

Andre widens his eyes at this. “You stay,” he informs Sasha. “I bring _my_ baby.”

“Are babies allowed to have babies?” muses TJ.

“Everybody’s a babe in this world, TJ,” Carly points a finger at him. “Babe. Whatever.”

“Yeah, babe. But babe is not _baby_. Andre shouldn’t be given custody of a plant.”

Sasha tries to mediate the situation: “He tries. If it’s in danger of dying, I’ll kidnap it from his house. I have the spare key.”

Andre runs back with his effort, which is around the same size and as sad-looking as Kuzya’s.

“Same grade,” Sasha announces, to Kuzya’s delight. “Can I have your children now. Give them to Grandpapa, I treat them much better.”

“I’ll grow a plant that Ovi will approve of,” says TJ, finding a seat on Carly’s lap, twisting to let Carly settle his arms around him. “Six feet tall.”

“That’s impossible.”

“ _Ovi_ is fucking impossible, but he’s still here, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Sasha agrees.

“There you go,” says TJ. “So if you exist, and he exists… I can build a fucking plant.”

“There we go,” relents Nicke, distracted with watching Sasha tending to the plants Andre and Kuzya have brought in, running his fingers through the dirt, his skin a soft, hazy green. It’s not a good idea to encourage the team like this—Sasha will just accumulate more plants to look after, but it’s not as if Nicke minds.

“You gonna bet on it?” Nicke asks. “Who wants to bet on it?”

 o     o  
 \  /

Management calls him in on the first day of practice.

They sit him down with stack after stack of paper, claiming that they want to re-examine what could be a liability to his career. The paperwork looks fresh and newly exhaustive—it still feels strange, to be sat down and explained to; but Nicke isn’t going to let any of them know that. He watches all of them and wonders how he will pay for the price of his body again—in this new, singular way where the immediate danger seems so inconsequential in comparison.

“We’re concerned for you,” they say. Nicke’s agent doesn’t respond to this, and neither does Nicke… who still doesn’t quite understand what they’re doing, but knows very intimately why they are.

“If you’re that concerned, you’ll be calling in the trainers, and not me,” Nicke says. He leans forward and looks at them head-on, knowing how inhuman he looks like this, something that ought to fit into this body, but doesn’t. “Why am I really here?”

“The doctors,” one of them says, her hands wide open, like Nicke’s a frightened animal. “They’re not sure how long your body can last like this. It’s not...”

Nicke watches her.

“You know,” she regains her composure and tries again. “It was a big operation, and the Swedes still have no guarantee of your functionality.”

Nicke shrugs at her caution. “You mean it’s not built to last.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“I do want to call it that,” Nicke says. “My body’s not built to last; it’s true. What did you want me to do? Play for the team forever?”

“We just want a back-up plan.”

“Do you?” Nicke asks. “Why wasn’t it already written out in the start?”

“We didn’t expect this.”

“You think I couldn’t be physically injured?” Nicke asks, incredulously, to foreboding quietness from their front. He wonders what they even think he is. “That, you know, here’s a player that’s not human, so why don’t we write a contract based entirely on that?”

“No,” she says, frowning, her head tilting to the side. Nicke stares down at her rounded, dark-rimmed glasses, at the rest of the soft-skinned idiots who have no idea what to do with him. He doesn’t even remember her name, clouded over by the whirring in his head. “Nicklas.”

“Yes,” Nicke raises his eyebrows at her. “Why are we even having this conversation about my fucking contract? It’s not as if any of you don’t know what I am. Treat it like a fucking pulled muscle, if you have to.”

“It’s a complication—”

Nicke huffs. “Do you do this to your human players?”

“No,” she says.

“Exactly,” says Nicke. “Why is it so hard to treat me like one?”

“Okay,” this woman says, closing her laptop. It looks fucking delicious. Nicke is tempted to eat it out of spite. “I’d just—I just want to have a talk with your agent outside, Nicklas. Is that alright?”

Nicke shrugs. “If you’d like,” he says, neutrally, staying put in his seat as everybody else files out of the room, ignoring the twinge in his hips.

He stares at the laptop.

“Fuck it,” Nicke says, grabbing it with his hands. He takes a clean bite of each corner, chewing his food vehemently enough that Sasha ought to burst through the window to take a video of him with his cheeks puffed out.

Nobody comes in for another half an hour. Nicke just sits there, the laptop in his hands, waiting—he can hear the voices from where he stays. He thinks back to how most of the waiting he’s done in his life had him strapped down to a table, or down in the dark where you could hear the wind scraping everything away above ground. This is not a bad position to be waiting in… Nicke almost doesn’t mind that he’s not part of the conversation. He’ll wait; he’s good at it—in the same way he waited to go to the NHL. Nicke chose to be here. He’ll keep choosing to be here; but it doesn’t mean he’ll settle less for anything he deserves. It’s what he owes himself. There is nothing for him anywhere else.

He looks to the clock, and wonders if every single one of them out there thinks of him this way… Gears and cogs. They’re not wrong. Nicke doesn’t know the mechanics of what’s inside of him, and he’ll be happy not knowing for as long as he lives. But there’s an appetite to Nicke that can’t be found in their human fucking world, so he eats the rest of the fucking laptop, only to be caught red-handed as they pick the worst timing to be finished with their discussions.

“ _Nicklas_ ?” The lady with the glasses screeches. Nicke remembers now—she’s a something Robinson; she’s busy and important enough for Nicke to not see her that often. “Are you _eating_ my laptop?”

“Maybe,” Nicke says. He offers what’s left of it to her, which makes half of the room burst into laughter. For a short second, Nicke grieves for all the files she couldn’t backup, but then decides he’s enough of an asshole not to care about it. “You wanna have some too?”

“No,” Robinson sighs, but she’s fighting a smile—Nicke knows this expression; he’s eaten her phone once, when he was famished at some charity auction that Sasha forced them to bring Nicke to. “You finish it.”

“Great,” Nicke says, standing up. He ignores the strangeness of operating the same body in an entirely different way, and looks around the room. “So? Give me all the things you want me to sign." 

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke gathers an armful of phones, old iPhone 4s, into his arms for the balcony table. He stacks them into neat little patterns next to each other, a little system that he’d perfected when he was newly born. Sometimes, when the storms were worse than normal—he would sit beside his little pyramids and ate his food as slowly as physically possible. His family would bring him more food as his pyramids grew smaller—and over time, when Nicke’s family grew, he did the same for the younger ones too; watched them eat painstakingly, aching for the storms to be over. But the storms never died—they only lessened in their severity. 

“Thinking?” Sasha asks, bare-chested, the hem of his sweatpants dragging over the floorboards: a warm, familial sound. “Skies aren’t very clear tonight.”

“I know,” Nicke says, and happily bites on the coiled cables that Sasha has brought him, settling into Sasha’s side. “I just like to be here, even if you can’t see that well.” He looks out to their garden, where the wind rustles the leaves before it goes quiet. Nicke feels strangely ancient under this sky, where the only thing visible is the moon, bright and clear and permanent.

He lets Sasha take his hand. “Back home,” Nicke says, “We had moons, you know—five of them. If you were fortunate, and if you had enough energy to climb out of the bunkers, you could see them for half a minute. And if you were favoured by luck… I heard that you could see the sandiness of them, the winds. Tornadoes, sometimes. Sandstorms, even there.” He laughs at it, takes a bite of the cables. “I think it was a lie. A story for children, really… But a rather poor one, by Earth’s standards. Why write a story this bleak?”

“We had stories too,” Sasha says. “About heaven. I don’t know how to put it. We keep imagining that the world would stay green.” His eyes stray to the trees, where they almost seem like an audience: attentive, watching, barely visible from the lights still turned on in the greenhouse. “That our homes weren’t rotting. But you could see the damage,” Sasha shrugs. “The brokenness. One day you wake up, and there’s people around you, like normal, except they’re all dead.”

“Death does that,” Nicke agrees. “Sneak up on you. But sometimes when you expect it the most…”

“Like a game of hide and seek?” 

“Sure,” Nicke says. “Just one that you keep on losing.” 

“I don’t think that’s true,” says Sasha. “Aren’t we proof?” 

“I guess we should have died by now,” Nicke murmurs. “You would’ve thought, wouldn’t you? That you wouldn’t have lasted this long? That after all they have done, you shouldn’t be here. We were never meant to be here.”

Sasha breathes out slowly, a habit he’s picked up when he’s thinking—searching for words. Nicke would almost call it assimilation, if he didn’t know better. But he does. It frightens humans, when Sasha goes still, when he relaxes and lets the sunlight surge into him, eyes half-shuttered, fingers outstretched. Nicke would sit beside him and lace their fingers together, happy at his tranquility, at how—Sasha loved inaction like he did. Sometimes the only thing Nicke wanted to do was to feel alive. 

“I hate when you do that,” Nicke says. “I hate it, but I understand it; it’s necessary, which is why I hate it most of all.”

“I know,” Sasha says. “I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be,” says Nicke. 

Sasha kisses his forehead. His arm is around Nicke, heavy, grounding. Sasha stops inhaling, and the world goes static and still.

“You think you’ll learn how to be okay with it?” Sasha asks. “Being the last one left.” 

“No.” 

“Me neither,” Sasha says. He’s looking at Nicke now, his head cocked, solemn. “We have—so little left. We have nothing left. We used to be spoilt with it, you know.” Sasha blinks, tilting his head towards the sky. “We thought the world would make space for us. We kept thinking that.”

“Nothing wrong with wishes,” Nicke says. “I wished for someone like you. My whole life. I sat behind those bars and hated myself for wanting someone to be here. The cruelest thing anyone could wish for.”

“Wishes don’t do things, Nicke,” says Sasha. “But I would have come here for you... I would do it again.”

“Thank you,” Nicke whispers.

“It’s true,” Sasha says. “I remember home. I want it back. But when I think—if it came down to a choice.”

Nicke feels light-headed, looking at him. “Sasha—”

“I’m fine here,” says Sasha. “I like being here, when I’m with you.”

“You should marry me,” Nicke blurts out. “It means nothing. I know it means nothing; but I want it, too—to be selfish this way, you know? I used to—when I came—I thought I’d died. I used to beg for a second chance at being alive.” He shuts his eyes and listens to the trees, the calm wind. Sasha rubbing his thumb over Nicke’s knuckles. He blinks his eyes open and raises his free hand to Sasha’s jaw. “I have it now,” he says. “My second chance is you.”

“Yes,” Sasha says. Tears fall from his face and onto their hands, where Sasha grips him tightly, tight enough to hurt anybody but him. “I’ll marry you, if you want me to.”

“I do,” says Nicke. “I don’t know if it matters.” He stares at how the moonlight maps out Sasha’s face in front of him. This second chance. “Maybe it doesn’t. I just want to make it right. I just need to make things right, for us—I just want to be happy. I want to live like a person. I want to be somebody that doesn’t just stay alive.”

“Of course,” Sasha says. “Of course you do—you should be. There’s nothing left for us, you know.” He looks up to the sky, “Up there. I wish there was. I think—the only thing left to do now is to live.” 

“I used to think it was impossible,” Nicke says. “After I came. I thought for sure…”

“But you did,” Sasha says. “You have.”

 o     o  
 \  /

Nicke touched signals with everybody he knew before the military came to take him. They showed him everything—their bunkers. Their dreams of this new world Nicke was supposed to belong in, next. Their food supply lasting them through one more storm. _Just one more_ , they told him. _One more, and now we can rest._

His family pulled him aside. They held him tight; they gave him their axes, their lucky charms. _You’ll learn to survive in this new world_ , they promised him. Nicke hadn’t known how to tell them that he wouldn't survive for sure—but they had taught him well, and he knew better than to transmit that. He saw their brightly-coloured world where the air was still and unmoving. Fields of animals. Everything they didn’t have. 

They stayed there and waited for it, doing nothing. Nicke didn’t even dare to think—he watched them watching him. They have waited together in this bunker together for so long… Nicke wished that he could have waited here with them. Give them his food when the hunger settled in. He didn’t want to go to this new world—he didn’t want to die alone. He wanted to be with them—here. To be a part of an erased history, to learn how to start being part of nothing.

And then they came—he said his goodbyes again. He held them one by one and hoped that he would take their pain away with him. The hurt of waiting to die. How he would tell the other life forms about his race. Their resilience in fixing themselves as the world slowly grew worse until it would stop. How it was sacrifice again and again.

He would live like they taught him to. He would be kind. He would take their pain and start again. He would dig his own bunkers and let everyone in; like they did for him.

 _You’ll be bringing us with you_ , said the eldest, before they had to pry Nicke away from touching him, from staying underground. He saw the ship from the open doors. _You’ll be staying alive for us._

 _You’ll be with me_ , Nicke screamed, desperate to stay as they dragged him away. He changed his mind. He didn’t want to leave… but it wasn’t his decision to make. If it meant carrying his family and their love into this new world with him…

 _I won’t forget,_ Nicke yelled, his antennae hurting with the force of it. He saw their resoluteness as the doors thumped shut as they carried him away. They didn’t say anything back to him, but he could see their pain, and prayed that at least his departure would take some of it with him. _I’ll survive it! I’ll survive anything!_

He kept screaming as they shoved him into his seat. He hadn’t cared—everyone else was screaming too; their signals distorting and almost fading into incoherency. Nicke strained in his seat to see his bunkers through the storm; he was the last one on, the youngest… And then the storm faded away, and there was nothing. No storm. Just a black pit, an endless space that frightened all of them. He touched signals with the ones that could hear him and tried to calm them—and then suddenly, Nicke saw this huge sphere, this planet that he supposed they would land on. He reached out to the window and marveled at it; how you couldn’t see any craters from where they were, as they were hurled onto it. Nicke had never travelled this fast in his life, and it was difficult; he felt his body struggling to hold itself together… It was clear that some of his podmates’ bodies couldn’t survive. He watched their antennae fade out and droop down onto their heads.

He turned away and braced for impact. He shut his eyes. He just had to hold onto himself, Nicke thought. To hold himself together. He will claw his way into a second life. He would learn how to survive this; he had to. He heard the terrible, groaning noise of the ship, of a mistake. He took his head into his hands as the speed increased. And then, suddenly—it stopped. The ship crashed. Pieces of it fell around Nicke and landed on the others. He didn’t dare to look, but he could hear their cries, cut off as they lost all their energy one by one. He was familiar with death. He had lived long and fortunate enough to see it happen over and over again. He didn’t need to open his eyes...

And then Nicke did. He couldn’t bear to check on his other podmates… None of them returned his signals. Instead he crawled out of one of the openings and gazed into the sky above him, a bright, pale blue. There was a glowing moon higher up in the sky. He climbed down from where he stood and stared at this new land. There were animals that were running away from the ship, where there was a small fire, but Nicke put it out with his body. He didn’t know what to do in this place, where there was grass… and fields of _something_ , that ought to be grass but weren’t, where the blades were beautiful and coloured, like nothing Nicke had ever seen before.

He climbed down from the ship to stumble after it. It wouldn’t be food. He knew it wasn't food; but Nicke wanted to see this, wanted to touch this miraculous thing. He touched it and marvelled at the colour. It bloomed so brightly in front of him. It must be what the animals here fed on; it was soft. It smelled sweet. He wanted to keep them with him. There were so many around him, in the mud. Nicke dug his feet into the ground, soft and pliant. He probed a hole into it soon enough.  

He looked back to the ship. Nicke looked around him. He could take this, he thought. He could live with it. He could make a new home, he could open its doors.

Nicke just had to start digging.  

**Author's Note:**

>  **content warnings:** this fic contains off-screen medical experimentation on nicky and sasha, although it does not go into much detail. 
> 
> i have to thank sunshinexbomb for essentially coming up with this universe with me... i'm sorry it wasn't crack like i promised oops. also to angularmomentum, kassie, and so many other people for holding my hand and crossing this road with me. thank you so, so much!
> 
> also, my kingdom for a comment, so if you have any thoughts, i'd be very happy to know about them!


End file.
